Savior
by Tare-Bear
Summary: Post-MJ. One-shot. A phone call shared between Peeta and Katniss while he is still in recovery. There are some questions he has that only she can answer, and he'll find that it takes only a few to get the thing he really wants to know. Kind of fluffy, not meant to feel complete.


It kills me not to know it. But I've forgotten the color of her eyes. Her scars and just how she got them. As I look through my mind I see an image of her; shiny and distorted. The pictures I'm shown are doctored. She's just an aging face that the nation has all but forgotten underneath the title mockingjay.

Her name's Katniss Everdeen. Not mockingjay. She's more. I can recall that much.

There is no cure they tell me. I don't want to accept it, but I'm not myself. I know Peeta Mellark loved Katniss Everdeen once. Except he–I–was a different boy then and she was a different girl.

Do I hate her?

I don't know.

My doctor has been working with me. He helps me decide what is real and what isn't. There are questions I have that only one person can answer. These questions have been drilling me and gnawing at my mind for months until, finally, I am given one chance to talk to the key person who could ever answer them.

We called for weeks, hoping she would answer one day, and finally on the third month in...she did.

"Hello?"

Her voice racks through my body for a moment. It seeps into my skin, along my bones and limbs, and when I suck in a tight breath I find my effort is completely spent already. It's an exertion to keep my fingers from trembling.

"Katniss?" I say. "I-It's me...Peeta."

There is a long drawn out silence, then, "I can't talk to you."

She's fumbling with the phone. She's going to hang up on me. I panic. The doctor sitting across me in his desk throws out a hand to aid me but I can not control the words that tumble out.

"Wait! Please. Katniss you owe me this!"

I don't know what made me say it. Maybe she did owe me. I'm quite certain she didn't but I find I don't care. Somewhere inside myself I knew that this would stop her, and it was right. There is a long annoyed sigh on the other receiver. She's still there.

"Why are you calling me, Peeta?"

"I have questions that only you can answer." I hear only silence at first, like she ran from the phone. Then there are deep breaths taken in and out. The sound of something falling over; a chair?

"Well..?" Katniss snaps.

"What's the color of your eyes?"

I didn't really mean to ask that one first.

"Gray. Yours are blue."

Was that relief in her voice? Surprise, yes. By my question no doubt. But relieved? Was she afraid of my other questions?

Gray. For a minute I'm not in this moment, instead I'm somewhere hot and muggy. I'm hanging on the edge of wakefulness and dream. My back encased with sand. Then I'm probed, I hear whisperings of my name. My eyes open. Steely gray eyes hover over mine.

I'm jolted back to the present.

"How are you?" I ask next.

"Still about as charming as a dead slug, I'm told." There is a tapping sound in the back ground.

"...Do you miss me?"

"Peeta." She sounds pained.

"No, you're right. Wrong question," I say, thinking of our last long awaited reunion. "It's stupid to think you'd ever stop-"

"Hating you?"

It sends a pang to my heart. "Yeah," I breathe, "that."

I knew, even if I don't remember, that I've always failed her. In childhood I was too chicken to talk to her. In the Games I was too weak to actually save her. In some way, and somehow she's never been happy. Never satisfied; always stubborn or arguing.

The next five minutes I wait for her to hang up. I don't say a word as I anticipate it, but she never does. She sits with me in the silence.

"How do I...how do we forget and move on? If this isn't, and hasn't, ever been love how do we ever get out? Cause I don't know."

More tapping. A small, frustrated hiss. "I don't hate you," Katniss whispers.

"You shoul-"

"I just want to save you," she continues, she sounded outraged but suppressed. "I tried so hard to save you while there was still something left to save. Then you.."

"I tried to kill you," I hiss, suddenly angry at myself. She did care for me. It's like someone punched me in the gut. She cared! And I ruined it by hurting her. "It wasn't me. I didn't want to, but it's too late. There's no excuse-"

"No. I don't...that's not what bugs me."

Huh? She isn't bugged by my insanity snap? The fact that she's in danger near me doesn't bug her?

"You stopped loving me. You started to see me like everyone else. That...this one look you used to get around me vanished. It broke my heart to see that you were no longer stubbornly in love with me. I couldn't admit it. Didn't even know it. Just ran. I grew too dependent on that love of yours and it was gone, ripped away so suddenly."

"I don't love you, Peeta," she continues to whisper. "I just can't live without your love. I'm a selfish pers-"

"No, you're a survivor." I'm struck then with that fact. Katniss has always been a survivor. It's what she does. Other memories are probed from my mind. Some are poisoned, but they don't stand out like the ones of her. It only takes me a minute to recognize the heavy feeling in my heart. "I still love you, you know."

Somewhere. Deep down. Where the Capitol failed to corrupted my soul.

"Why?"

"Cause when you sing, all the birds stop to listen."

* * *

><p><em><strong>AN: **This is actually a song-fic. It goes with the song 'Savior' by: Rise Against _

_Listen to it! It's amazingly accurate. It even mentions her ties to fire, the beach of catchfire, etc..etc.. _

_Thanks for reading, sorry for typos. Reviews are nice! -Taryn(:_


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